Rob Diaz de VillegasWFSU-TV

When I heard it was supposed to rain on Saturday, I was a little bummed. I was planning on taking the family to the FSU Coastal and Marine Lab Open House followed by the FSU Spring Game (where my 12-week old son could attend his first football game featuring my two favorite teams). Luckily, the storms rolled through early in the morning and made for a nice day at the coast.

I started off by visiting my friends at the Randall Hughes and David Kimbro labs. Robyn and Emily held down the fort in the Hughes lab, where kids watched a very peculiar sport. As Randall’s previous post promised, there were indeed periwinkle snail races. As you can see from the photo at the right here, the snails were color coded (white and blue) and numbered so that they could be told apart. Some crown conchs (periwinkle predators) were placed into the tubs to give the smaller snails some incentive to climb. The fastest climbers won. Let’s watch part of one race: